Hollywood has been trying to get an adaptation of Neil Gaiman‘s The Sandman off the ground for years, and as of now it looks like Joseph Gordon-Levitt will be the guy to finally make it happen.

Although Warner Bros. has not yet said when exactly we’ll see the Sandman movie, the producer (and possibly also star and director) assures that it’s coming. “We’re working towards it,” Gordon-Levitt affirmed in a recent status update. Hit the jump to read his latest comments on the project.

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Why would Joseph Gordon-Levitt sign on to be involved with the Warner Bros. film based on Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman? The obvious overarching answer is that WB has been wanting to put the actor/filmmaker in an even bigger role than he had in The Dark Knight Rises, and with Sandman he gets to be one of the people calling the shots.

But more specifically, why Sandman? It’s a property with a large, dedicated and detail-obsessed fanbase. A Sandman film that gets things wrong will be received particularly poorly, and bringing the story to the screen in an effective manner is going to be a tricky proposition. That could be an appealing challenge. As he puts it, for Joseph Gordon-Levitt, part of the appeal is the fact that Sandman is a unique large-scale project that is out of the typical groove of tentpole films.

And while he’s talking about the project, Gordon-Levitt explains that one of his Sandman tweets should perhaps not be construed as a harbinger of the first storyline to come.

There’s a new issue of Neil Gaiman‘s The Sandman on stands now. It launches a short ongoing story called TheSandman: Overture, acting as an explanation of events that preceded the first issue of the seminal comic series. It’s the first new Sandman story since 2003, and the first series of multiple issues since the series originally ended in 1996. (And, in keeping with some periods of the original publication, Overture is already experiencing delays.)

All of which is a long way of saying that a lot of people are thinking and talking about Sandman again, and that seems to have re-ignited the interest in making a movie at Warner Bros. The latest word is that David Goyer has pitched a take that WB likes, and that Joseph Gordon-Levitt is the ideal candidate to play the lynchpin character Morpheus. Read More »

First Joss Whedon dropped off Wonder Woman, then it was announced that David Goyer walked away from The Flash so that Big Liar director Shawn Levy could come aboard (destroying any hope of a descent movie), and now the guy who brought us Batman and Robin wants to direct Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman. Please say it isn’t so. Have the movie studios gone mad?Read More »